Oh hi, it's been a long time.

I figured some folks may still be here who know me back from my LJ Smith fandom days, and might be interested to see that I wrote two new stories in the Redux series - the first in 14 years: Family and Fealty. They're IMO a very satisfactory mix of emotional processing and unabashed smut.

Also... LJ Smith died, and all the public places to grieve are... not really the place to leave the kind of memorial I'd like to offer.

In the memorable way of Dune fandom, I would like to say:

I Was A Friend of Lisa's

And only now that she's gone, have I been able to put together some essential pieces of her life, and be open about others:

She was a Friend of Dorothy's, and she was One of Us: A slasher, a fanfic writer. A queer woman who stayed closeted and private and maybe even went off the deep end from all the layers of secrets and loss in her life.

I have her Blake's 7 slash fanfics from the 80s. Her vampire brothers, Damon and Stefan? Are modified characters from her queer stories. Every time any of us slashed her characters, we were doing exactly what she would have done in our place.

Her "best friend" who she dedicated books to all those years? Was her roommate, in the "they were roommates" sense. Her life partner, hidden in plain sight.

No wonder she was so protective of Lisa. I can maybe forgive her now.

Why were so many of her characters queer-coded? Why were so many of her women, in particular, so enticingly Sapphic even when they ostensibly had boyfriends? Because she, too, was queer. Sapphic. Closeted to some degree, though we her fans will never know how much. She knew how to write secretly-queer characters because, at least in her public life, that's exactly what she was.

I wondered for many years how such a sizeable portion of her devoted fans grew up to be trans, enby, queer, gay, etc.

And here's my answer: She was one of us all along.

Happy Pride, LJS. Although I parted ways with your writing and your persona many years ago, I will always miss the You I knew through your books in the 1990s, and I'm glad you are now at rest. Thanks for everything you gave us.

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